Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [108]
Alec Szathmar a few years ago, while under great stress in the vaults of the First National Bank, suffered a heart attack. I loved foolish Szathmar. I worried terribly about him. As soon as he was out of the intensive care unit, I ran down to see him and found that he was already being sexual. After heart attacks this is common, apparently. Under the powerful crown of white hair, bushy on the cheekbones in the new style of adornment, his gloomy eyes dilated as soon as a nurse entered his room though he still looked purple in the face. My old friend who now was stout, massive, was restless in bed. He threw himself about, kicked away the sheets, and exposed himself as if by fretful accident. If I was making a sympathy call he didn’t need my goddamn sympathy. Those eyes of his were grim and alert. At last I said, “Now Alec stop this flashing. You know what I’m talking about—stop uncovering your parts every time some poor old lady comes to mop under the bed.”
He glared. “What? You’re stupid!” he said.
“That’s all right. Quit pulling up your gown.”
Bad examples can be elevating—you can win a quick promotion in taste and say, “Poor old Alec, flashing. By the grace of God, there never goes me.” Yet here I was in the jury box with an erection for Renata. I was excited, amused, I was slightly mortified. Before us was a personal-injury case. In fairness I should have gone to the judge and asked to be disqualified. “Your honor, I can’t keep my mind on the trial because of the glorious lady juror next to me. I’m sorry to be such an adolescent. . . .” (Sorry! I was in seventh heaven.) Besides, the case was only one of those phony whiplash suits against the insurance company filed by ‘the lady passenger in a taxi collision. My personal business was more important. The trial was only background music. I kept the time with metronomic pulsations.
Two floors below, I myself was defendant in a post-decree action to deprive me of all my money. You might have thought that this would sober me. Not in the least!
Excused for lunch I hurried to La Salle Street to get information from Alec Szathmar about this wonderful girl. As I ran into the Chicago crowd I felt my pegs slipping, the strings slacker, my tone going lower. But what was I to do singlehanded about a force that had seized the whole world?
There was a genteel and almost Harvard air about Alec’s office, though he was a night-school lawyer. The layout was princely, sets of torts and statutes, an atmosphere of high jurisprudence, photographs of Justice Holmes and Learned Hand. Before the Depression Alec had been a rich kid. Not big-rich, only neighborhood-rich. But I knew rich kids. I had studied rich kids at the very top of society—as in the case of Bobby Kennedy. Von Humboldt Fleisher who always claimed that he had been one was not a real rich boy while Alec Szathmar who had been a rich boy told everyone that he was really a poet. In college he proved this by possession. He owned the works of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. He memorized “Prufrock,” which became one of his assets. But the Depression hit the Szathmars hard and he didn’t get the silk-stocking education his doting scheming old father hoped to give him. However, just as Alec in boyhood had had bikes and chemistry sets and BB guns and fencing foils and tennis rackets and boxing gloves and skates and ukuleles, he now owned all the latest IBM equipment, conference phones, desk computers, transistor wristwatches, Xerox machines, tape recorders, and hundreds of thick law books.
He had gained weight after his coronary, when he should have thinned down. Always a conservative dresser he tried to cover his broad can with double-vented jackets. So he looked like a giant thrush. The exceedingly human face of this bird was framed with stormy white sideburns. The warm brown eyes full of love and friendship were not especially honest. One of C. G. Jung’s observations helped me to make sense of Szathmar. Some minds,